


Pursuit

by Missy



Category: Laverne & Shirley (TV)
Genre: Barbecue, F/M, Flashbacks, Ice Cream, Kid Fic, Love Confessions, Memories, Road Trips, Romance, Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:15:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29895495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: A sequel to Morning Song, Two Lovers and a Beachcomber By The Real Sea and The Night Dances.A stop on the road leads to a renewal of vows...and other parts of Lenny and Laverne's relationship.
Relationships: Laverne DeFazio/Lenny Kosnowski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 4





	Pursuit

**Author's Note:**

> Morning Song: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29530848  
> Two Lovers...: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29620194  
> The Night Dances: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29752866
> 
> Italics mean flashbacks.

They were two days into the trip – halfway across Texas, with George Jones pouring out of the radio of the ice cream truck, the U-Haul trailing behind them like a scared toddler – when she suggested a pit stop.

“Someone needs to have his didy changed, and we should probably get some dinner and figure out where to bed down for the night.” Laverne’s watch told her it was almost eight – most barbecue joints should still be open. Lenny found one, active with teenagers and families and covered over with chrome and bright red neon. Delicious-smelling smoke filled the air, and her mouth watered. It was a clean enough place that she didn’t mind nursing in the ladies’ room and felt fairly fresh and clean when she was finished.

Lenny held up a paper boat filled with crinkle-cut fries laden with cheese and crumbled bacon when she emerged. “Don’t say I don’t love you when I bought you fries,” he said, and they sat outside at a large wooden picnic table anchored in a gravel bed and topped with a wide blue and white-striped umbrella. There were also thick cuts of brisket, big rolls of yeasty white bread and thick pickles. Lenny had gotten an oversized bowl of mac and cheese for himself. Even though Joey had eaten his fill, he reached out for the food as their parents stuffed themselves. 

“You need teeth first,” Laverne told him, and he whined and bounces in his high chair.

Lenny snorted. “Y’got something…” he said, and spat in his palm before reaching to wipe her face.

“Len!” This was something she often did for him.

“Shut up, lemme fix it,” he said. And then he wiped some sauce that had gotten on her cheek. Laverne rolled her eye at his fussing, but couldn’t resist leaning into him, into it. She didn’t like being babied most of the time, had resisted Shirley’s neverending attempts to do so. Most of the time Lenny received the same treatment from her - it was hard to break her Wendy Darlingesque feelings for him. But this time she let him clean her face.

“Want some ice cream?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. 

“Be right back,” he said. Another kiss pressed to the top of her head and she watches him go. Tenderness mixes with a blast of erotic warmth as she watched his tushy flex as he walked back to the restaurant. 

A year later and it’s still new to her, feeling loved – letting him take care of her when she had so often taken care of him in their shared childhoods.

She watched Joey finish his bottle of apple juice, and then turned her eyes to the wheat fields surround the stand. What had been born of neon and chrome had been consecrated in many places, but the most important place was a quiet motel room a few miles off the main strip in Reno.

_This was not her bed._

_Laverne – instinctively tensing upon waking, braced against falling into the pool that had lain beneath her for years - recalled the California King she’d bought when she’d gotten promoted a couple of months ago. But the scratchy sheets were still cold and unfamiliar under her hip._

_Then she realized the man she’d gone to bed with earlier in the evening wasn’t in bed beside her. He was sitting at the edge of it, watching her sleep._

_“Do you want something?” he asked suddenly._

_“Len, why’re you watching me like that?” She sat up._

_“I’m just thinking, Laverne.”_

_She made a sympathetic noise. “And you have a headache, huh?”_

_“No,” he said. “Just…y’know we got married and we did…all of this…” he gestured toward the bed. “And I never said that I loved you, and you never said you loved me.”_

_And so the real Lenny – the vulnerable, timorous Lenny who lit up whenever he thought she had finally admitted her love for him – had emerged. “Len…”_

_He got to his feet and started to pace. “Laverne, if you don’t wanna stick with me, I understand. Neither of us were thinking a lot last night. My best friend’s going to Canada and I ain’t gonna see him for months or maybe years. You just got off a bad relationship, and the last one…” She frowned at him. “…The last one didn’t turn out so good. We just gotta talk about it now, before we leave Reno.”_

_“Len!”_

_“If you don’t want this to last, then we gotta end it before I fall deeper than I already am.”_

_Was that possible? Lenny had always liked Laverne – a little, occasionally a lot, enough to want her to be happy and enough to marry her when she had gone too far for the millionth time, gotten drunk and dishonored her father for the billionth time. She felt guilty – but then again what reason did she have to feel bad? Why should she feel guilty? She’d wanted him just as much. She still wanted him._

_“I want to stay married,” she said._

_“Because you love me?” his eyes were wide and bright._

_The words made her heart beat in fear, but it wasn’t as hard as it was with Sal. “I love you,” she said immediately._

_“Just as a friend?”_

_“I think that stopped being part of the question after you made my eyes go back into my head for the tenth time last night.”_

_He grinned, bit his palm. Then he noticed the line of her sight and flushed, grabbing his briefs from the floor. This was not a conversation to have naked. “But do you love love me? For real?”_

_“Lenny!”_

_“If it’s all about sex,” he said, “it’s fine, but…y’know how ‘all about sex’ works out for us most of the time.”_

_She frowned. “All right. So, maybe the marriage is about sex,” Laverne shrugged, rested her chin on her knee. “There are worse reasons to get married than great sex.” She stretched out, felt her knees crackle and remembered the past twenty four hours with a smile._

_Lenny shook his head. “I like being with you, Laverne. I like listening to you talk and singing with you and dancing with you and when you hug me.” She turned toward him, looked into his eyes as he stumbled into his jockey shorts. “You have to know that. It ain’t just this.” He gestured toward the bed he’d helped her thoroughly rumple. “Though I ain’t going to pretend I don’t like the sex part.” They were years away from calling what they’d done vodeo-do-doing but it still felt weird to hear Lenny baldly call a spade a spade. “I love you. All of the little different parts of you, even the bad stuff. I want to spend my whole life going to the movies and cleaning spilled popcorn out of my crack ‘cause you jumped when something scary happened. I wanna play baseball with you and catch everything you throw at me, and I wanna be on the same side in a snowball fight. Being around you’s enough, Laverne. It’s everything.”_

_She looked up at him, full in the face, as he finished his speech. She couldn’t say anything at all for a moment or two, as he stood there in front of her in his underwear. Laverne knew that she was awful at expressing herself emotionally. She’d had to tell Randy she loved him when his back was turned, and she still regretted her own cowardice, her refusal to grasp something good and hold on to it._

_She didn’t try to guard the words, or even plan them, as they spilled out. “I like the way you move your hips when you play onstage with Squig. I like how you help me, even when I don’t want you around. I like the way you care about people around you, even though they ain’t always nice to you. I like how smart you are…” he snorted and she continued, “…not the usual way, but about people. I can’t imagine seeing another Godzilla movie without you. I like how sweet you are, when you don’t got to be, even with people who don’t deserve it...”_

_“Laverne,” he sighed._

_She grabbed him by the arm, pulled him back onto the bed. “I love you,” she said, making every syllable count._

_There was a beat of a moment. Her heart. His. Then he grabbed her and pulled her into his arms and held her in place, hard, his fingers groping through her hair._

_“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, and she felt thoroughly exposed, as if she’d been lying to herself for years._

_“When all the guys you’ve ever really loved die on you, you learn to keep the words to yourself.” That was the truth, and while it didn’t take into accounting the Sonnys, Sals, and Fonzies who had breezed through her life. From Randy to Mike, the ones she’d hoped to marry had died on her. No wonder she’d decided to keep things close to her vest with Lenny._

_“I won’t leave you,” he said suddenly._

_“You can’t promise me….”_

_“…I won’t die first,” he said, and just squeezed her harder._

_“Lenny…” She grabbed him, pulled him closer, and rolled him over onto his back._

_“I love you,” he said, diving under the covers, pushing her silk nightie she'd bought at the duty free shop in the lobby over her thighs, his mouth hot as it rushed over the skin he’d bared. Already Lenny was beginning to figure her out, and Laverne wasn’t entirely sure if she liked that._

_“God, I love you,” she admitted, half-surrendering, half-realizing how she’d felt all along._

_“Love all of you,” he said, then guaranteed she wouldn’t have anything more to say about it for the following sixty minutes._

“I saw you checking me out,” he said, breaking the memory, the fantasy, and pushing a big dish of fudge ripple ice cream toward her. 

“I was making sure your jeans were clean.” She dipped her spoon into the ice cream and rolled it over her tongue. Lenny had gotten himself a cone of chocolate, naturally. First, though, he took Joey and burped him, using a napkin to keep his shirt clean. Joey was intrigued enough to reach fussily for their cones, but Lenny kept the ice cream out of his grip.

“Gotta wait six more months, kid,” Laverne said. She had a whole chart of Things You Should and Should Not Feed Your Child, and babies shouldn’t have ice cream until they’d passed their first birthday. Joey entertained himself with a pair of chubby keys - thankfully easily distracted like his father.

“Right, my jeans,” Lenny said. He proceeded to flick his tongue over the side of the ice cream cone, as if he was licking the curve of her breast.

He knew what he was doing – and for the first time in a long time, heat pooled in Laverne’s cheeks, arousal teasing her belly. But two could play at this game. She circled the tip of the spoon as if it were the head of his cock and he almost choked on his mouthful of ice cream.

They behaved until they finished their ice cream, then tossed out the dishes and headed back to the truck. Laverne had no idea where they were going next, but they couldn’t sleep here. 

And, to tell the truth, she was planning on avoiding sleep entirely.


End file.
